Asthma Kids Deliver Rallying Cry On New Single “The People United & Strong”

Asthma Kids are angry. They have always been angry. But on their ferocious new single, The People United & Strong, that anger has been alchemised into something even more dangerous: hope. This is not a soft pivot. This is a band that has looked at billionaires hoarding the planet’s resources, looked at the boot on the neck of the working class, looked at a world on fire, and decided that the most radical thing they can do right now is demand that we stand together. This is not protest music that hedges, The People United & Strong is a punk earworm that refuses to stay inside any lines at all. Asthma Kids are famously genre-agnostic, stating plainly that they leave labels for soup cans. Adjacent to punk, freak folk, country, and power pop, they are ultimately something else altogether: seemingly nice neighbours living next door to musical convention, until they burn down every house on the street. The song was born in the studio on the day frontman Trevor Hutchinson became a grandfather. His twenty-year-old daughter gave birth while the band were mid-session, and that eruption of new life cracked something open in the writing. A grandchild entered the world and a punk anthem came out with him.

“We had a musical structure and I was working on lyrics that matched the anger of our recent releases but that life news got me to frame our message in a positive light that promotes unity. I’m still beyond angry, it’s time for us to tax billionaires out of existence and end the psychopathic distribution of wealth. But that is going to take unity, harmony and love.” (Trevor Hutchinson)